Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Why can’t I see them, Nanny?’

‘Because they live underground.’

‘Are they dwarves?’

‘They’re spirits which take on the form of bodies to emerge above ground.’

‘So why do they live buried like that?’

‘Because the Gaels arrived from Spain under the leadership of Mil Espaine and conquered the land. That was why the sidhes descended down into the centre of the Earth to devote themselves to magic.’

‘Even if the sidhes were minutely small I could still see them. I see everything, Nanny.’

‘No one has ever succeeded in seeing the smallest beings, Leonora, not even the scientists with their microsopes:

Big fleas have little fleas

upon their backs, to bite them.

Little fleas have lesser fleas

and so on ad infinitum.’

Sidhes jump on to the table when Leonora does her homework, they share her bath when she gets into the tin tub, her bed when she goes to sleep. Leonora speaks to them in a low voice: ‘We’re going to go down into the garden, come with me.’ ‘Mlle. Varenne is a pest, help me to make her vanish.’ ‘She’s worn us out with her past participles and her subjunctives.’ The French are like that.

‘Elle nous casse les pieds,’ says Leonora. ‘She’s breaking our feet,’ she translates for her mother. ‘Que tu voulusses, que nous fîmes, que vous fîtes’ are verb tenses that not even the French use any more. Not even Louis XIV himself knew how to conjugate them.

The sidhes are even better friends than Gerard: both children have devoured Jonathan Swift, but now Gerard no longer wants to play at Lilliputians, nor solicit an audience with the Emperor Blefescu. These tiny people emerging from the ground are her advisers now, supplanting Gerard, who is no longer interested in Lewis Carroll’s Alice, or in Beatrix Potter carrying her pet rabbit Peter under her arm. These are girly things. The sidhes are wiser than anyone else in the world, wiser even than the biggest fish in the pond, and that’s saying a lot because that fish knows it all. The girl pauses on the embankment and the fish tells her all will be well and she feels lit up by the silver reflections along his back. Of course, this was with Nanny’s assistance.

‘May I ask you a question that no one has ever been able to answer me?’

‘Go ahead and ask.’

‘When will my father die?’

‘You’re right, I can’t answer that one.’

‘Nanny, why do we have to sleep at night?’

‘Because it’s too dark for us to do anything else.’

‘Owls can, and so can bats. I’ve always wanted to go to sleep hanging by my heels like a bat.’

Nanny agrees: ‘Yes, it’s an excellent position, since it circulates the blood to the head.’

During the night Leonora wakes her up:

‘I can see a boy with no clothes on sitting on a branch of the ash tree, calling to me.’

Nanny gets up and leans out of the window:

‘There’s nobody here.’

‘I have to go to him, he’ll freeze under that white sun.’

‘The ash is the largest and most beautiful tree on the planet, its roots reach to the sea, its branches support the sky and, like the oak and the hawthorn, it is inhabited by fairies who wouldn’t admit a boy without its permission,’ says Nanny, sitting herself on the edge of the bed until the girl returns to sleep.

The same thing happens when they go for walks around Crookhey Hall:

‘I saw a boy who held his little hand out to me, a little tiny hand, and I went to give him mine when he cried out and faded away.’

‘I can’t see anything, Prim.’

‘Don’t call me Prim.’

‘It’s just that you’re all stiff and proper, look how you extend your neck.’

‘I detest it when you call me Prim. Look, here he comes again. He’s just hidden himself behind that tree.’

Nanny searches and smiles: ‘It seems as if you attract the sidhes .’

‘Yes, I wish they could play with me my whole life long.’

‘If you keep reading, Prim, you’ll never be alone. The sidhes will accompany you.’

The young girl draws them on the nursery wall and her mother doesn’t punish her because she too is used to painting the boxes they sell at her charity fetes. Maurie draws flowers she then colours in, while Leonora paints horses and adds one pony after another on the surface of the whitewashed walls. Maurie admires her daughter’s skill: ‘You did that really well.’

If Nanny asks her which is the toy she loves best, Leonora replies:

‘Tartar is my favourite. He loathes my father.’

Whenever she is reprimanded she mounts her horse. If Gerard doesn’t want to come out into the garden with her, she rides Tartar until someone else comes into the nursery. If they refuse her dessert at mealtimes, Tartar’s rocking is more than adequate recompense for even the best chocolate cake the world has to offer.

The odour of stew draws her in, quite possibly because it is forbidden to enter the kitchens. Deep within are bubbling the mysteries of steak and kidney pies, roast beef and haddock. The old yellowed cook, propped at the side of the stove, waits for the stew pot to come to the boil. Her daughter, who works there as a maid, tells her that if she feels ill, for God’s sake she should go and lie down; she can do her job perfectly well.

‘You complain all day long, Mum.’

‘You dolt!’ shouts the cook. ‘Here I am fainting with pain and you’ve no sympathy at all!’

‘Well go and hang yourself then! There are plenty of trees outside and rope’s not dear.’

‘I should have drowned you at birth,’ responds the old woman, quivering with rage.

How can people treat one another like this? Leonora enters a different world to that of the nursery, different again to that of the stables, a world only she knows how to reach, where no-one can stop her from riding bareback or cuddling the colt, who pricks up his ears and snorts in greeting. A smell of lamb pervades the kitchen. The soup is boiling up the odours of stable, hayloft, manure, adventure, of a mane blowing in the wind that has to be grasped so tightly not to fall off and of discovery: along with the knives, the kitchen drawers hold scents that must have come all the way from Mesopotamia.

IN THE NURSERY AT HOME Leonora relives the stories told her by Mary Kavanaugh, and in Westmeath by her maternal grandmother, Mary Monica Moorhead.

‘Ireland is the emerald green square in the great eiderdown that covers the Earth,’ says Nanny.

‘And who tucks in the Earth to go to sleep at night?’

‘The sun. The sun gives cover to the poor. In Ireland, so does the mist.’

Every day the Carringtons walk the Westmeath roads and out of the mist come shades that assume the form of birds and lambs, occasionally of a fox, and frequently of horses like those Leonora so loves, or of shepherds calling up their flocks. The four children go out for walks even when it rains. ‘The waters of baptism,’ Nanny tells them and closes her umbrella, for if water is good for lettuces and greens, it can turn children into fruit. Grass lies on the earth like a sheet, and Leonora enjoys watching it sway in the wind, softly inclining its cheek on to the pillow. How sweet and obedient is the land! Trees, too, bend in the wind, and their branches reach for the hills. They return home in time for tea, cheeks ruddy and shiny, hair spangled with tiny raindrops, and Leonora bears within her all the energy of every horse in the land.

‘You really are like a mare,’ says her grandmother. She even asks if she has hooves instead of shoes, since her footsteps are so loud. ‘How many fillies in each leg?’ The most glorious outing is that out to the Belvedere, with its park and gardens, which descend like a royal carpet leading to the lake. Grandmother is first to raise her head.